A registered contact is a person whose contact information have been provided by the organisation(Administrative, Technical or Billing) and considered to be the representative of the organisation in our databases. AFRINIC will only attend to service requests originated from the organisation's registered contacts.

You must either be introduced by an existing registered contact of your organisation (details required are name, address, e-mail and phone number or nic-hdl) orYou can contact MyAFRINIC support staff at myafrinic-activate@afrinic.net who will ask you for verification information before adding you in as a contact.

PA space is what has been allocated to LIRs from which they can assign or sub-allocate to end-users / downstream networks as non-portable block. If the end-user / downstream network changes provider, the address space assigned or sub-allocated by the previous service provider (LIR) should be returned and the network renumbered.

Reverse delegation is reverse DNS record which map an IP address to a name. It is usually maintained by the organisation who receives direct allocations from an RIR. Reverse delegation is achieved by use of the special domain names in-addr.arpa (IPv4) and ip6.arpa (IPv6). It is usually used to validate a forward DNS record, make network troubleshooting more user friendly by providing names instead of IP addresses and also as part of e-mail anti-spam best practices.

Route object is an object created in Internet Routing Registry to specify the Autonomus System Number "ASN" that will propagate this exact IP prefix to Internet. It can also be used to give information about the organisation that advertises this prefix. Route objects are usually protected and only a person with the authorised password can change them.

Route objects are usually used by Internet Service Providers and Upstreams to validate that routes received from their peers are legitimate. This usually help eliminate routes hijacking if used by all providers. They don't eliminate the need for BGP configuration and advertisement.

An LIR may receive an additional allocation when about 80% of all the address space currently allocated to it has been used in valid assignments and/or sub-allocations. A new allocation can also be made if single assignment or sub-allocation requires more addresses than those currently held by the LIR.

An excellent Reverse Delegation "Mini-Howto" is available from the documents' section of our website here. You may also contact hostmaster@afrinic.net if you have properly followed the instructions in the document, and reverse delegation still looks broken/non-functional.

The AFRINIC Database provides mechanisms to control who can make changes in the database and what changes they can make. The distinction of "who" vs. "what" separates authentication from authorisation. The maintainer object serves as a container to hold authentication filters.

Until the launch of AFRINIC’s IRR in 2013, AFRINIC members used the RIPE IRR to register their objects. Now that AFRINIC has its own IRR, members are encouraged to populate it with their objects instead of using the RIPE IRR.

Members can check their free/used allocation via the MyAFRINIC member portal. A query from the whois database can also give an approximate "visual" impression of how much has been utilised, for example to return a list of all registered assignments from 10.0.0.0/16 block; you can use:

An assignment with status Assigned PA is an inetnum object created by LIR to register the IP addresses that have given to specific customer or service. These IP addresses are only used by the customer or service and can't be further distributed to another customers. The minimum IP addresses per assignment PA is /30.

Both assignments and sub-allocations are objects created by LIR to indicate that specific IP range has been assigned to a customer. If the customer intends to further distribute the IP addresses to his own client then, the IP range should be registered as sub-allocation. If the customer will solely use the IP addresses for his own infrastructure then, the IP range should be registered as assignment.

AFRINIC members are encouraged to maintain the assignments to its customers. In case of sub-allocations, the request is redirected to the AFRINIC hostmasters for evaluation (Sub-allocation window of members = 0)

Yes, the assignments made out of a sub-allocated PA address space can be registered in the AFRINIC whois database using WHOIS e-mail update method. This functionality is not yet available from the myafrinic member portal.

The LIR member shall ensure that a maintainer is created for its customer & attached to the inetnum (SUB-ALLOCATED PA) to allow for the assignments to be registered.

The sub-allocated range is part of the LIR allocation and can't be transferred. If the customer is no longer your customer, the IP range must be returned to your free pool IP addresses. You must notify AFRINIC to delete the sub-allocation object by sending an e-mail to hostmaster@afrinic.net.